
WASHINGTON—Donald Trump just bombed Iran. That’s unconstitutional, Al Green notes.
Green, the Democratic congressman from Houston, wants to impeach Trump for the bombing. Trump violated the Constitution’s War Powers clause, which reserves to Congress the power to declare war, the lawmaker explains.
Green may be alone in calling for the impeachment of the right-wing Republican president on the vital issue of war and peace. However, when it comes to Trump’s other constitutional crimes, statements from other lawmakers, the Brennan Center for Law and Justice, the Center for American Progress, and others reflect how the list of crimes gets longer by the day.
Just Trump’s violations of the Constitution’s First Amendment alone, ranging from Trump’s ICE agents’ kidnapping of peaceful protesters and observers to threats against lawmakers for speaking their minds, would fill a book. They practically do at the progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress.
Trump even broke the Constitution when he broke labor law by declaring his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, could unilaterally revoke worker rights, with no appeal, says AFL-CIO General Counsel Jody Calemine.
“When a president can say what an unfair labor practice is, everybody should be very afraid” because he can apply that same rule everywhere, Calemine told reporters. “He says he is the law. It’s a power grab.”
“Do we want to be on record having opposed Donald Trump’s tyranny and fascist power grabs? Or to lie on the couch and have it be too late to act?” asks Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March.
No one should be surprised by the breadth of Trump’s constitutional violations. He is, after all, the president who was impeached for ordering, aiding, and abetting the Trumpite invasion, insurrection, and coup d’etat attempt at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And that was the second time the U.S. House impeached Trump, a record.
And while Democracy Forward, a non-profit, non-partisan legal organization, has recently come to the fore in aiding unions, law firms, universities, and everyday people—citizens or not—deprived of their rights, it was actually founded at the start of Trump’s first term in 2017.
Its lawyers and their supporters, including a wide range of unions, recognized even then that Trump was a threat to the Constitution and the entire democratic system of government.
So it seems fair to say Trump has broken our basic charter of rights, liberties, and responsibilities—and the separation of powers in our government over and over and over again—more than any other president.
“In a recent interview, President Trump responded to a question as to whether he had to uphold the Constitution with, ‘I don’t know,’” wrote CAP’s senior director for government affairs, Peter Gordon.
“In the more than 150 executive orders” since he returned to the White House on January 20, the president “frequently asserts he is acting under authority granted him by Article II of the Constitution. In fact, the Constitution is intended to limit the powers of the presidency, not provide nearly limitless authority as President Trump is contending.”
“The Constitution does not give a president the power to violate the Constitution, create or change congressional statutes, or override U.S. Supreme Court decisions—no matter what the EOs say.”
Constitutional violations compiled
Specific constitutional violations compiled by CAP, lawmakers, the Democratic Attorneys General Association, and Democracy Forward include, but are not limited to:
- Challenging the right of anyone of color to be a U.S. citizen, despite the clear, blunt language of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. It says “all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the states wherein their reside.”
Trump lost a “birthright citizenship” challenge in the lower courts. His administration appealed it to the Supreme Court and a ruling is expected by late June or early July.
- Using the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 to have ICE agents summarily remove and deport people—alleged Venezuelan gang members—without due process of law, as the Constitution’s 5th Amendment guarantees.
Trump has flown some immigrants back to Venezuela, others to different locations in Latin America and some to civil war-torn South Sudan in Africa. A Trump-named U.S. District Judge in South Texas ruled against one AEA removal Trump ordered. The Ronald Reagan-named judge says that law can only be invoked in times of “declared war or invasion or predatory incursion.”
“An invasion is a military affair, not one of immigration,” the jurist added.
- Millions of privacy violations, all to both gather information on individual Americans while also opening them up to the private greed of former Trump partner Elon Musk, then head of Trump-named “Department of Government Efficiency” teams.
DOGE computer nerds seized sensitive confidential financial information about individuals from the IRS, medical information from the Department of Health and Human Services, and data about labor law cases from the Labor Department, among others.
That’s unconstitutional. The 4th Amendment specifies a right to privacy: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated” except when there’s “probable cause” backed by sworn search warrants. DOGE, of course, had neither.
- Punishing political enemies, including law firms and universities. Trump punished the law firms for defending his opponents by restricting their rights to practice in front of the government and threatening to cut off their clients.
Most firms caved. Kirkland & Ellis, a Chicago-based firm that provided partner Albert Jenner, a key House Judiciary Committee counsel during Richard Nixon’s impeachment, didn’t cave. It beat Trump., Nixon, too, wanted to use the government “to screw our political enemies,” in the words of top aides.
- Executive orders yanking business from the law firms and threatening clients also “appear to be unconstitutional and in violation of multiple sections of the Bill of Rights,” CAP said.
One federal judge called such “using the powers of the federal government to target lawyers for their representation of clients and avowed progressive employment policies in an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints contrary to the Constitution.” That violated the constitutional protections for freedom of speech, equal protection of the laws, due process, and the right to counsel.
- Trump also pursues vendettas against leading universities, which he alleges aren’t cracking down on—and violating the free speech rights of—peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters. His actions feature yanking all the federal research grants they get, and, in Harvard’s case, actually trying to ban it from accepting foreign students. Harvard hasn’t caved—yet. Columbia has.
- Breaking the Constitution’s “speech and debate clause” protecting lawmakers from being sued for whatever they say in Congress. Ed Martin, Trump’s controversial interim U.S. Attorney for D.C. “sent letters to Democratic members of Congress and senators purporting to investigate their public political speech as criminal threats.” Martin became too hot for even Trump to handle. He asked Trump to withdraw his nomination.
- In another constitutional violation Martin warned top law schools “to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs or their graduates would be blacklisted from Justice Department jobs.”
Trump cites two Supreme Court rulings, overturning affirmative action in college admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, as justification for banning DEI programs government-wide, including in firms and universities that receive federal grants and money.
Trump’s Education Department—or what’s left of it—sent word to school districts nationwide to shut their DEI programs or face the loss of federal Title I student aid to schools with high shares of poor kids.
Prohibits free speech restrictions
“The First Amendment prohibits the government from mandating a speech code and prohibiting free association for the public,” one progressive legal analysis says. “The 5th Amendment prohibits the government from punishing people and privately held organizations without due process of law.”
- Using tariffs as a bargaining bludgeon against enemies and allies alike, while claiming, with little evidence, that his high tariffs, especially against China, will bring factory jobs back to the U.S. Several unions agree with him. The AFL-CIO is more dubious, saying high tariffs can be used to help counter—and stop-foreign trade cheating. The Manhattan-based U.S. Court of International Trade had no doubt at all. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, “the power to lay and collect tariffs,” it declared—in a lawsuit brought by right-wingers: The Koch Brothers and the Federalist Society.
- Withholding money Congress appropriated. Nixon tried this, too, and Congress struck back in 1973 with the anti-Impoundment Act. Trump’s doing it now, say the top Democrats on congressional appropriations committees, which actually help dole out federal funds.
“The Trump Administration is breaking the law and undermining the Constitution every day by illegally stealing funds for the programs that help American families and businesses, firing career civil servants without cause, and dismantling agencies created by acts of Congress,” says one of the two, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.
“If presidents can decide when to spend and not spend all on their own, then Congress becomes little more than an advisory body to a monarch. Certainly that’s what the framers thought,” the Brennan Center for Law and Justice adds.
- “The Trump-appointed acting director of the Office of Management and Budget ordered a government-wide impoundment of trillions of dollars that Congress,” the Brennan Center adds. That would end, OMB said, “after it reviewed whether agency activities implicate policies the president opposes, specifically citing ‘DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.’ It created immediate chaos” and lower court wins against Trump.
“In the words of one court, the budget office’s order ‘fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government,” especially Congress’s power of the purse,” the Brennan Center said.
Whether Congress will halt Trump’s transgressions is dubious. The history of impeachments shows a giant reluctance to use that ultimate constitutional weapon to deter executive excesses. The GOP-run House approved Trump’s “reconciliation” bill with budget cuts and his “recessions” bill clawing money back, including funds DOGE unconstitutionally grabbed. That leaves curbing Trump up to the courts.
And while U.S. District Court and Appeals Court judges have often taken on Trump, the Supreme Court, with its right-wing Republican majority—including three of that six-justice bloc whom he named—has often rolled over for him, most recently on June 20.
That’s when the majority gave the green light to his latest executive fiat: Shipping a planeload of undocumented people whom Trump’s ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents had grabbed off the streets, dragged out of cars and nabbed at courthouses to a war-torn nation most of the migrants had never even heard of, South Sudan.
It’s up to the High Court’s nine justices to step in and stop Trump, but those who cite his constitutional crimes are not sure it will. CAP’s Gordon says the court is using technical rulings, such as upholding a lower court order to “facilitate the return” of Smart-TD member Kilmer Garcia to the U.S. from a notorious Salvadoran prison, to sidestep the real issue.
“All this poses a big test for the Supreme Court,” the Brennan Center adds. “The omens are not all good. Less than a year ago, the supermajority issued one of history’s worst rulings, granting presidents vast criminal immunity when they claim their actions are ‘official.’
‘Now these same justices will have to parse Trump’s bid to seize personal control of the government. They seem to be squirming to avoid a direct conflict.”
Concludes CAP’s Gordon: “When a president acts beyond the scope of his constitutional powers, members of his administration and the other branches of government must step in to stop him, lest the nation face not just a constitutional crisis but also the dismantling of American democracy.”
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